ITV Schools Programme Schedules

Here's a clipping from a newspaper, dated 24th March 1969. Schools programmes started much later in the day than in later years (and indeed currently) and continue on into the afternoon.

Notice the gap in programmes at midday. If the gap was larger than 20 minutes the ITV stations would tend to use a startup rather than an interval, although some stations had a visually simpler start-up sequence to use rather than to invoke the more formal evening/weekend start-up.

Schools programmes didn't start at 9.30am until (it is thought) October 1972, when the restrictions on broadcasting hours were lifted, and ITV launched a daytime schedule beginning after the schools programmes at midday.

Having said that, some regions, probably the smaller ones like Border and Channel (who couldn't afford to broadcast the longer hours) appear to have continued broadcasting schools programmes in the afternoon after that date.

This is the Midlands regional variations box from the same day.

Notice the extra schools programme at 2.40 - Ici La France.

Yorkshire, Granada, Harlech and Westward also took this additional programme, but Southern, Anglia and Channel didn't. Other ITV regions are not covered in the listing.

Show me the whole listing in a new window!

The Racing presenter would have welcomed the regions joining the programme at 3.00, since the programme started at 2.50. On other occasions, the presenter would have said his farewells to regions leaving coverage early.

Note that on-the-hour times are written as, for example, '3.0' instead of a more contemporary '3.00'.

Also notice that, although ATV was then 7 days-a-week, the newspaper still refers to a more generic 'Midlands' rather than calling the station by its name, as done for the other ITV regions.

Now the Midlands area used to be split, with ABC at the weekends and ATV in the week, and London used to be split (and still is split, in 2001) with, in 1969, Thames in the week and London Weekend on Saturday and Sunday. In newspapers these regions were referred to by their region names, perhaps because of their weekday/weekend split.

This went on for many years afterwards - old habits die hard!

The pre-1968 pan-North region is more complex, because it was converted from a weekend/weekday split to two 7-days-a-week franchises, the North-West and Yorkshire.

Here we see a listing for 22nd May 1973 from the TV Times.

This is after the legal restrictions on broadcasting hours were lifted (in Octiber 1972) and the pattern of the daytime schedule has settled doen into pretty much how it would remain until 1987.

Three-and-a-half years after the introduction of colour, two black-and-white programmes were still being used: High, Wide and Deep and Rules, Rules, Rules. This illustrates the longevity of schools programmes: often the information and relevance to the curriculum is still valuable, even if fashions have changed considerably!

You can also see the listing for the that morning's/afternoon's programmes (250K), where Emmerdale Farm is on episode 62, Rainbow hasn't got Geoffrey in it and ATV's Johnny Patrick makes an appearance on a Terry Wogan show.

We also have that day's evening's ITV programmes (250K), where the ITN News was at 5.50, Crossroads was at its Midlands time of 6.35 and there was a cartoon (!) at 7.30. Thanks to Nick for these!

Not only that, here's the cover that went with it.

Check out the price - 5p! The TV Times in the first decade of the 21st Century is now approaching a Guinea :-)

For the rest of the week's schools programmes, click here (100K).

Here's a part of a booklet that would have been sent to schools to inform them of the times of broadcast for Ici La France, an ATV schools programme.

Usually these booklets would contain support materials for each programme in the series.

Click on the image to see a larger version in a new window.

(Thanks to Trevor Wells for the scan)

9/9/01

This is a quite detailed schedule from the late 60s, more specifically after Autumn 1966 (as it refers to ATV Network as opposed to Associated TeleVision) and probably before July 1968 (as Rediffusion programmes are listed, although Rediffusion's schools programmes were still broadcast after the July 1968 franchise changes, despite Thames being the contractor after this time).

It details where the interludes are (so that teachers can move pupils in and out of the TV room) and where the closedowns are so that we can get a good look at a Picasso tuning signal :-)

There's a bigger version available with all of Monday's and Tuesday's programmes by clicking on the image, which will open in a new window.

As an aside, Chris Bowden-Smith adds "Rediffusion London's schools programmes continued to be used for several years after they handed over to Thames.

"Rediffusion London's own front and end caps were left on till late 1969, after which they were replaced with Thames frontcaps at the start - but leaving Rediffusion London's endcaps at the end."

(Thanks to Trevor Wells)